to pay the wits in the capital, "that he will not consider himself bound by that promise; seeing that every week he receives so many private notifications of that appointment, that it would quite beggar him for them at that rate." With respect to the various petitioners, the bakers, the glaziers, the hair-dressers, &c., they all maintain, that though Fitz-Hum may have been a spurious prince, yet, undoubtedly the man had so much sense and political discernment that he well deserved to have been a true one. ON THE POETRY OF SOUTHEY. SOUTHEY and Scott are the only great writers of the present day, that have confined themselves in their verses to the fair and direct path of poetry. They have come forward simply, as men moulded and informed like the rest of the world, not affecting to be honoured with temper or wisdom different from that of their fellows. They display superiority of genius, 'tis true, but that superiority not in kind, but in degree. They do not strike at any latent chord of sympathy, at any untried sentiment; but their bold and seemingly hopeless attempt is to enchant and enthrall us by touching on those common feelings, that have been stricken, and harped, and jarred, almost into apathy. Yet do they succeed. Pure heroism, unmingled with any save common traits of character, infantine love, unsophisticated religion—these are the trite sentiments with which they yet contrive to fling a spell over us-these are the vulgar every-day passions, with which unalloyed they enchain our sympathy, and lead us, lost in delight, from volume to volume. Few people accustomed to the egotism and consequent facility of our present style of verse, are aware of the great arduousness attendant on writing poetry in this old and modest style. In past times there were no schools of poetry, as amongst us; there might have been diversity of taste, but that applied merely to the accidents of criticism, to words, to rhymes, to melody, or some such particulars. And whatever different creeds of philosophy were then afloat, they at least had not as yet pretended to make part of poetry. To this unity and universality of feeling there was allowed but a general appeal. Then was fraternity in the reading world -- all were to be addressed or none. The poet, to be one, must have been "the poet of all civilization," and his only means of success lay in awakening those feelings that were in every heart. Any attempt, similar to those made in the present day, to obtain the name and reputation of a poet, by catering to the select passions or philosophies of a narrow sect, would have fallen to the ground, contemned and unnoticed. The poet was compelled to look abroad, not within; and to consult his own spirit but so far as it beat in unison with all its fellows. The fillagree work of oddness, or of egotism, would have availed nothing. He could work but on the staple feelings of humanity; on those which every writer of sense and nonsense had been weaving and interweaving for a thousand years. It would not be astonishing, if other poets of inferior, at least of not superior talents, have reached a much higher point of fame and popularity by deserting this strait path. These have sought by-paths in the sympathies of individuals, and, as a narrow sect is always loudest in its adorations, their names have been noised and are famed in places even where their works are unknown. This has in a great degree been the good fortune of the Lake school, to which, developed in most popular publications, we can scarcely consider Mr. Southey to belong. When Mr. Wordsworth presents the public with a volume, he presupposes them to have gone through a certain course of thought and chain of argument, without which his verse is nonsense. When Lord Byron presents us with a canto in octave rhyme, he presupposes us to be worn-out men of dissipation, who have made sufficient progress in sentiment to have none, without which his verses are worse than nonsense*. So that if a person will not undergo the pains of hard thinking to enjoy the one poet, or hard raking to enjoy the other, he may as well leave their volumes on the shelf. Southey and Scott make no such unreasonable demands; it is merely necessary for their readers to be blessed with sound sense, fair taste, a decent respect for religion and virtue, in order to enjoy all the delights of poetry from the instant they open the volume. The greater the reader's feeling or his taste, the greater will be his pleasure; and if he have but a moderate portion of either, he is still not debarred from a proportionable measure of delight. The door is not slapped in the face of his understanding, as would be the case if such a reader ventured on the Excursion; nor would his rigid sense of propriety be outraged, as in the case of his opening Don Juan. There are two modes of criticism--the absolute, which judges a work singly, examines how far and how justly it is calculated to convey pleasure, and how much it excels or falls below the ideal standard of excellence in its kind-the other, which we may call * We need scarce assert, that the essay containing these allusions to the great man we have so lately lost, had been written before tidings of that melancholy event had reached England. : the relative, is more the mode at present, and chiefly aims at determining the comparative powers and genius of the writer. It is a pity that the first, or old, stern species of criticism has been so utterly destroyed and rendered disgusting by the dull scholastic cant, verbal cavillings, and straight-waistcoated rules of its ancient professors. If its influence still prevailed, we should at least not be so inundated with crude volumes of silly affectations, or of loose verses loosely strung together. Still, however, it might be too stiff the other way and were its judgments without appeal, there can be no doubt that Southey would be considered the first poet of the age. This is not altogether our opinion; but we are much mistaken, if it would not be the opinion of Dennis, or of Johnson, were these critics resuscitated. The new or comparative species of criticism, seems at the first glance odious, according to the proverb; but it is so vague, so indefinite, possesses so many outlets, and permits so many digressions into infinite speculation, that it is, notwithstanding, less personal and more kindly than its predecessor. For all disquisitions of the kind-the balancing of one poet against another, and estimating their respective merits, at length become resolved into one or two questions, which must ever be left at issue, as incapable of being decided one way or the other. Southey, of all the poets of the day, has undoubtedly the greatest power in pictures of pure imagination. Byron has equal or greater pre-eminence in the conception and expression of passion-but who shall decide which of these qualities, their degrees supposed equal, constitutes the greater genius. Southey has no passion-he seems all as bloodless as a fish. Byron, on the other hand, hath but scant imagination, and whenever he is in want of a basis for any of his poetic fabrics, he generally takes it from the nearest source, without even the affectation of originality. But then who shall speak a passionate soliloquy like to him? No poet, that the earth ever produced, except Shakspeare. In this point of view, Southey and Byron stand together, as Milton and Shakspeare; for Milton had none of the passion we speak of, yet few would class him inferior to his brother-bard. Were we compelled to decide as to the pre-eminence of mental powers, we should be inclined to bestow it on the mixed imagination-on the inventive faculty, nourished by observation of self and others, and applied to the scenes of life. In this, Shakspeare again excepted, Scott is without a rival. But he is not equal to scenes of pure imagination: he can conjure up a spirit, and cause us to shudder at it, but his sympathies are all the while with his fellows,-with the flesh and blood, not the spirit. Whereas Southey seems quite a denizen of the kingdom of the elements. He is calm and loftily at ease in the midst of marvel and magic-he does not create his world of spirits to gaze on them from a distance, or from this grovelling earth-he spreads his wing like his own beautiful Glendoveer, and becomes one of the celestial throng: "Of human form divine was he, The immortal youth of heaven who floated by, In those blest stages of our onward race, Low thought, nor base desire, nor wasting care, Deface the semblance of our heavenly sire." КЕНАМА. There is no man of genius, the cast of whose spirit is so much to be envied as Southey's. It is the pure "well of feeling undefiled," the mind of an infant grown, with the maturity of all but disappointment about it. It has never been steeped in passion, nor resolved by the alchemy of human life into any essence of feeling, foreign to itself. It has not undergone the usual changes of quick and high-wrought minds, that run a brief career from one vain species of excitement to another, till they end in languor and demoralization. There is all life and freshness about Southey, as palpable in his latest as in his earliest productions; he betrays no morbidity, no disease of the heart, but seems ever ready, as a child, to play with the bright creations of his own fancy. The gradual loss of this freshness is the great canker of passionate minds, which soon lose all taste for pure imagination, and cease at last to discover mental food in aught save downright egotism. They corrupt their own minds, and in retribution are condemned to behold no object but that same mind corrupted. The imagination, in its natural state the medium of poetic vision, becomes unavoidably tinged by the objects that are permitted to pass through or to dwell in it. If these be corrupt and base, the imagination itself is corrupted by them, grows coloured, and at length opaque; it excludes the beautiful and refreshing pictures of life, while it presents itself in their stead, no longer the medium, but the sole and exclusive object of contemplation. From this description of poets is Mr. Southey toto cælo removed, and he is in consequence much and unjustly looked down upon by the followers of the impassioned muse. He has thus met the fate of all who avoid extremes and choose the middle way, whether in politics or poetry. Contemned by the lovers of turbid frenzy and frantic passion in verse, he is almost equally deserted by the contemplative votaries of the Lake school, who deem him but an uninitiated intruder upon their fantastic realms. And if it were not their policy to keep on good terms with the critic, it is to be doubted if the poet alone would possess attractions powerful enough to preserve the co-fraternity. If Southey in some instances does appear to disadvantage in comparison with Wordsworth, it is that he has not so devotedly paid his court to the muse. He argues and reviews, has meddled with politics and controversy, and even in earliest life interested himself in unpoetical considerations of church and state. Perhaps the great cause of mediocrity in our poets of the eighteenth century was, that they did not live poetical lives, that they did not nourish those peculiar veins of thought which suit their calling. It was but by fits and starts that they recurred to their epigrams and couplets, and never thought of exercising the " vision and the faculty divine," except in the very act of composition. Now Mr. Southey, we should suspect, has lived a poetical life no further than living a regular and a virtuous one; this is a great way to the object, but not all. His soul has not been exclusively in his poetry, which uncondensed and diffuse, marks that little was brought to it, save the casual thoughts of immediate inspiration. His poetry has no body, no substratum from which it springs, as that of Wordsworth so manifestly has. Hence Southey wants that homogeneousness, remarked as the peculiar characteristic of his friend, which unites all his thoughts and composition, however fugitive and various, by one common bond, and sheds an interest and beauty even upon his puerilities. This great characteristic of Lakeism, Southey wants altogether; although he seems not to be aware of any difference or deficiency of the kind, by his imprudently publishing several minor poems, similar in simplicity to those of his friends, but without any of their redeeming qualities to support them. He has shown in this and at all times too much confidence perhaps, and seems to think his milk-and-water hours quite good enough for the public. But his vanity is at the same time so ingenuous and put forward with such perfect bonne foi, that it passes more for strength than for weakness of character. To enter into the spirit of Wordsworth and Southey; the former must be studied in his minor poems, the latter in his larger works. With the exception of some exquisite ballads, and one or two other poems, the light effusions of Southey are scarce readable in our opinion; whilst, on the contrary, the Lyrical Ballads rank with us higher than the Excursion. It is but the accidents of the Lake school that Southey possesses; he seems neither to value nor indeed to understand their more subtle principles. He cannot look upon inanimate nature with their glorious and all hallowing thoughts. He is religious, simply religious; but his devotion is single, concentred, and not any thing like the fine poetical adoration of Wordsworth and Coleridge. His mode of contemplating man too has nothing in common with the Lakers,-except when he unsuccessfully imitates them in his minor pieces. Animals he regards more in their vein, and the following beautiful passage from "Thalaba" strongly marks how far he adopts their peculiar modes of feeling. He is theirs at first, but as soon as he comes to paint inanimate nature |